Concentration of power in the Executive
undermines the balance of powers among three government branches,
which is one of the key safeguards in our Constitution. Historically,
concentration of power has been associated with despotism, corruption
and abuse.

The Presidency of the United States has
grown gradually more powerful since the Constitution was established
in 1789, but the process accelerated since 1941. Many wartime
expediencies that were initiated during World War II continued
afterward through the Cold War. The overblown military, the
un-accountable CIA, and a vastly expanded Department of State
continued through the second half of the 20th Century.

Even in this context, the powers
claimed by George W Bush were breathtaking in their contempt for the
Constitution. There was no significant opposition in Congress or the
Liberal Press, or (especially) in the Supreme Court when the Bush
Administration shut down access to information, initiated domestic
spying, detained prisoners without trial, and modified the laws
passed by Congress with the subterfuge of "signing statements".

Perhaps the most disturbing new Presidential power is the one least discussed: the power to make war. The Constitution provides that only Congress has the power to declare war, and yet the US has fought five full-scale wars in the last 60 years in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, all without formal declarations from Congress. There have also been numerous smaller-scale military operations, all without Congressional approval. The urgencies of war quite naturally lead to concentration of power in the executive. The specter of a President leading the nation into war with a hidden agenda of consolidating his power is shockingly grotesque, if all-too real. The possibility of self-serving hostility is precisely the reason why the Constitution has given the President no say in the decision to go to war, and why the violation of this principle has led to untold tragedy.

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Many of us hoped that when Bush left
the Oval Office and a Constitutional scholar assumed the presidency,
most of the worst excesses of the Bush years would be reversed; but
shockingly, the expansion of Presidential powers has continued.
President Obama left us dumbstruck in the opening months of his
administration when he defied campaign promises and announced that he
wouldn't investigate the crimes of his predecessor because he
didn't want to "do anything that would...weaken the institution
of the presidency."Huffington Post article from March

Garry
Wills, writing this week in the New York Review, tells the story in a
broad context.

...the
momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily
reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush
administration. The whole history of America since World War II
caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The
monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in
chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear
alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire
national security state, the classification and clearance systems,
the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and
information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II
with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"--all
these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to
effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency
powers (1941--2009) have made the abnormal normal, and
constitutional diminishment the settled order...

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Even
in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly
came to resemble Bush's. Gay military personnel, including those with
valuable Arabic-language skills, were being dismissed at the same
rate as before. Even more egregiously, the Obama administration
continued the defiance of the Constitution's "full faith and
credit" clause, which requires states to recognize laws passed
by other states, when it defended the Defense of Marriage Act, which
lets states refuse to recognize gay marriages legally obtained in
another state. Many objected when Dick Cheney would not name energy
executives who came to the White House in 2002, though Hillary
Clinton, as First Lady, had been forced to reveal which health
advisers had visited her. Yet the Obama team, in June 2009, refused
to release logs of those who come to the White House. (It later
reversed itself, but only in response to a lawsuit.)

Some were dismayed to see how quickly
the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the
unaccountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium. Leon Panetta
at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him during the
Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post,
"Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the
ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first
place." A White House official told Jane Mayer of The New
Yorker, "It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Perhaps it should come as no surprise
that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National
Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task...

Bush's steps were extreme and
autocratic, but it may be Obama who is doing the greater damage, by
putting the stamp of bipartisan legitimacy on indefensible abuses of
power.

Josh Mitteldorf, a senior editor at OpEdNews, blogs on aging at http://JoshMitteldorf.ScienceBlog.com. Read how to stay young at http://AgingAdvice.org.
Educated to be an astrophysicist, he has branched out from there to mathematical (more...)